This week brings the world premiere of the new large-scale orchestral work from John Luther Adams, which Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot will perform Thursday and Saturday. My preview for The Seattle Times:

“Close your eyes and listen to the singing of the light,” exhorts Octavio Paz in “Piedra Nativa” (“Native Stone”)….

One of the several highlights at this year’s Lucerne Easter Festival for me was the performance by András Schiff, his keyboard partner Schaghajegh Nosrati, and the Cappella Andrea Barca. An evening of superb music-making.

The conceit of the program was to play works — by J.S. Bach and Mozart — only in C minor. That tonality has no monolithic connotation, of course (even in Beethoven you can find variance). What’s more, aside from contemporary aesthetic theories that did ascribe particular qualities to C minor, they all end of contradicting one another. Not to mention that the change in historical pitch over time is such that “C minor” for Bach isn’t even the same key, objectively speaking, as later.

So I can’t say I came away with any particular new insights into C minor or the affective use of tonality, with the exception perhaps of the concluding work, Mozart’s K. 491 Piano Concerto. But the focus anyway was on exquisite communication of shared values among like-minded musicians — and, here, Schiff & Co. provided pleasure and insight aplenty. The ensemble, by the way, is teasingly described by Schiff as a tribute to its fictional namesake, a peasant “probably born between 1730 and 1735 in the Marignolle hills near Florence [who] had a close connection to Mozart, for whose private concert of 2 April 1770 at the Villa Poggio Imperiale in Florence he was said to have served as page turner.” Rrright….

I was also delighted to get to experience the incredibly talented young German-Iranian pianist Schaghajegh Nosrati, who alternated with her mentor Schiff as the lead on a pair of Bach double concertos for keyboard — played here, naturally, on Schiff’s beloved Bösendorfers. Their styles make for some really interesting contrasts: Schiff’s BWV 1060 was almost geometrically precise, beautifully manicured, while Nosrati seemed more song-oriented, her cantabile in the Andante of BWV 1062 taking rapturous flight.

After intermission, Schiff and his ensemble treated us to meditations on the regis thema from Bach’s Musical Offering: the C minor theme supplied by King Frederick II, with which Bach built this endlessly fascinating edifice.

Schiff really does approach Bach as a sacred text. It’s not about trying to put his stamp on this music or to somehow make it new with an unexpected interpretive decision here, an infusion of personality there. Instead, Schiff gives you the impression of turning a key in the lock, opening up a treasure box or the entrance to a magical labyrinth.

With Mozart’s K. 491, on the other hand, I did sense a personal stamp, but not by way of indulgent effusions of emotion or “expressivity.” In fact, I don’t think I’ve experienced a more deeply engaging live account of this concerto, of which, according to lore, Beethoven was particularly envious. (There’s no question that he was lastingly inspired by it.)

What Schiff and his colleagues brought out was a subtler pathos — quite different from Beethoven and the later Romantic readings of C minor — that made Mozart’s incomparable feeling of balance and proportion utterly vivid and rich in meaning.

Earlier, the winds had provided a sort of interlude, playing Mozart’s K. 388 (384a) Nacht Musique, but they were in even more eloquent form here, where that choice suddenly made sense, given the special prominence of the winds in the scoring of K. 491. The finale’s variations conveyed something deeply enigmatic.

I realize it’s only the inertia of tradition that keeps Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci glued together as a double-bill; otherwise they seem silly side by side, a forced pairing that makes no sense. Is it precisely this juxtaposition that makes Cav so difficult to direct? Or is it just the temptation to read too much into it, not accepting the naiveté and directness that are the essence of Mascagni’s opera?

I was thinking about this after seeing the current edition of the pair at Geneva Opera (in its pop-up temporary performance space at the Opéra des Nations). Each opera was divvied out to a separate director: Emma Dante for Cav, Serena Sinigaglia for Pag.

This Cav fell dramatically flat, while the Pag was thoroughly gripping and delivered its expected punch, plus some — the contrast in effectiveness all the more striking.

Cav had the burden of an overcooked dramaturgical conception, juxtaposing a re-enacted Passion scenario with the simple melodrama of jealous lovers and revenge, all set on a darkly-lit stage. A recurrent tableau ensemble showed Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion, hammering home an intended parallelism with Giovanni Verga’s narrative and its atmosphere of Gothic gloom, without the countervailing joy of the Easter celebrations in which it unfolds.

This dampened the built-in effect of the musical contrasts, despite the excellent work of the chorus prepared by Alan Woodbridge. The casting was weak, above all for the Turiddu (sung by Marcello Giordani, who sounded alarmingly strained at the top of his range).

I’d seen and admired Emma Dante’s Macbeth at Edinburgh International Festival last year, so the miscalculations here were surprising. New to me on the other hand was Serena Sinigaglia, who understood how to pace the interactions in Paglicacci for maximal impact. There was just one misstep, in my opinion: a prolonged meta-theater indulgence during the Prologue, with Stage Director and Co. frantically getting the set of forlorn wheat fields in place, which surrounded a simple wooden stage.

It wasn’t that cliché, but the power and intensity of the performers who brought home the ironic point that art and life literally bleed into each other. Maybe verismo isn’t the “slice of life” naturalism it’s so often claimed to be so much as an aesthetic given to its own kind of stylized artifice that tries to make sense of recurring human patterns. Certainly the presence of the crowd here felt more palpably pressuring, willing participants in this society of codes, than in Dante’s Cav.

Diego Torre delivered a genuinely terrifying Canio, and Roman Burdenko (had just sung a thrilling Alfio) gave Tonio an almost Jago-like infusion of malevolence. Nino Machaidze’s combined beauty and grit for a memorable portrayal of Nedda.

Conducting the house Orchestre de la Suisse Romande with dramatic flair as well as melting lyricism was Alexander Joel throughout the evening. He was especially attentive to the range of colorings in Leoncavallo’s more complex score.

The Met’s new production of Così fan tutte, which is directed by Phelim McDermott, opened earlier this week. Here’s a link to my note for the program:

In December 1789, while he was immersed in composing Così fan tutte, Mozart concluded a letter to his friend Michael Puchberg with an invitation to stop by his apartment for an upcoming private rehearsal of the opera-in-progress….

Music offers time a centre. – This trope by John Berger puts the two main concerns of this festival – music and time – into a generative relation. Such a centre – in motion, elusive, non-geometric, plurimodal as it must be – would allow for a different point of view. From such a musical centre, one may sense the divergent temporalities each of us inhabits simultaneously, and draw relations to the ongoing fundamental transformations happening around us.

Yet the trope allows for another reading. The frozen self-image of Western art music places music outside of time as well as outside of its own time: by claiming avant-gardism – being ahead of its time, and by clinging to abstractions – timelessness, universality, structure. Contrary to this (Berger seems to suggest), music – all sorts of music – may in fact be a centre for and a portal to things temporal, may grant access to time in varied modalities.

More than ever, time – as a political category – is of the essence when it comes to learning to make sense of the erratic commotions of the present. Maybe music can help us find ways to do so. This is a time for listening.

–“A star just went out in the cosmos. We have lost an amazing human being. Stephen Hawking fought and tamed the cosmos bravely for 76 years and taught us all something importantabout what it truly means to celebrate about being human. I will miss him.” — theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss

Professor Stephen Hawking has nominated his three favourite classical works for a special concert at this year’s Cambridge Music Festival, which is taking place throughout this month. The festival’s theme is “Mozart, Music and Maths”, making the University of Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics the obvious person to approach for his all-time favourite pieces.

The concert will take place at King’s College Chapel on November 11 and will feature Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony Of Psalms, Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Francis Poulenc’s Gloria.

In his staging of Don Giovanni for Komische Oper Berlin (dating from 2014), Herbert Fritsch wants us to forget all about the mythology of the “demonic” that has been larded onto Mozart’s second collaboration with Da Ponte.

Fritsch and his team zero in on Don Giovanni as above all a dramma giocoso, indeed an opera buffa, its roots in the commedia dell’arte made conspicuous. Veering far from the dangerous immoralist we tend to encounter, Günter Papendell portrays the Don as a hilarious combination of clown, matador, and vaudeville showman. Wearing a Joker-smeared smile throughout and detachable blond rug, he plays stadium-rock air guitar to accompany his mandolin serenade and disappears into Hell with his index finger pointing up, followed by a black-out. No choral epilogue, no moral to the story (sung in Sabrina Zwach’s very clever German translation).

By that point, the wonderful KOB orchestra — led by Ivo Hentschel with high energy that didn’t stint on flecks of lovely color — had the entire auditorium resounding with Mozart’s terrifying D minor. Yet it felt exhilaratingly fresh and theatrical, not the same old inevitable pattern.

Whatever criticisms one may have of Fritsch’s choices, he doesn’t “deny” or “contradict” the music — in fact, gestures showed great sensitivity to every detail of Mozart’s score — but is determined to wipe away the clichés. An interesting choice that initially baffled me but then seemed to work: the Overture is displaced until after the opening scene, breaking out like a commentary on what has just happened.

The cartoonish shtick and artifice were indeed greatly enhanced by Victoria Behr’s colorful costumes and Fritsch’s own simple set of black-and-white lace design hangings in continual motion. The chorus of townspeople inched and lurched about the stage like zombies.

The aesthetic perspective here occasionally reminded me of those moments in Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous stagings where things are pushed to such a comic extreme that there’s room for unexpected reactions to emerge: especially in Don Ottavio’s two arias, rendered with heart-stopping lyricism by Adrian Stooper. The emotional dissonance is theatrically gripping, and Fritsch shows an unwavering conviction that opera is a form of theater.